In Russia, Telegram was banned

The Tagansky District Court of Moscow decided to limit access to the Telegram service in Russia. This was stated by Judge Yulia Smolina.

The court also granted the petition of Roskomnadzor to immediately block the messenger. Now Roskomnadzor should forward the court decision to telecom operators with an indication of the need to take measures to restrict access to the service. The domain names telegram.org, web.telegram.org, t.me and the IP addresses of Telegram servers can be entered in the register of blocked pages. After that, providers will have to limit access to messenger resources within 24 hours from the time of updating the registry (it is updated daily at 9:00 and 21:00 Moscow time).

A representative of the human rights organization Agora (representing the interests of Telegram) said that the decision will be appealed. The representative of the messenger was not present at the meeting. On the eve, April 12, the creator and CEO of Telegram Pavel Durov prohibited lawyers from participating in it, so as not to "legitimize the frank farce" by their presence.

And about. the head of the Roskomnadzor legal department, Maria Smelyanskaya, before the announcement of the decision, stated that the Telegram "covers all provisions of the law on information, including the duty to provide the authorities with the keys of decipherment upon request." Correspondence with the Telegram administration confirms that the messenger does not intend to do this, she added. At the same time, Roskomnadzor has made all necessary actions to ensure that the TG fulfills its legitimate duty, "the agency representative added.

"We understand that the information that spreads through Telegram can violate the law, be used by terrorist and extremist organizations," Smelianskaya noted. - To present a threat to the security of the Russian Federation, life and health of citizens, to the users of this network ".

Keys to a stumbling block

According to Russian legislation, the organizers of the dissemination of information on the Internet, which include messengers, e-mail services, etc., are obliged to provide keys to decrypt user correspondence at the request of the FSB. The FSB requested from Telegram the keys back in mid-July last year. However, Pavel Durov stated that the service does not intend to implement laws that are "incompatible with the privacy protection and privacy policy" of the messenger. Also representatives of Telegram noted that it is technically impossible to fulfill the requirements of the special service. In particular, in so-called secret chats, correspondence is encrypted by the end-to-end method, where keys are stored on users' devices.

On March 20, Roskomnadzor issued an official notification on the need to comply with the requirements of the FSB and threatened Telegram that it would file a lawsuit on its blocking in Russia if the keys were not handed over within 15 days. Pavel Durov again stated that threats will not work, and the company will continue to "defend freedom and privacy."

Roskomnadzor filed a lawsuit demanding that the messenger be blocked in Russia on April 6. As it became known on April 11, Telegram acts in this case not as a defendant, but as an interested person. At the same time, the department insisted on the immediate execution of the court decision on the blocking of Telegram.

The head of the "Agora" Pavel Chikov also published in his Telegram channel a response to Roskomnadzor's notification about the need to transfer the encryption keys to the FSB, which says that the server infrastructure of the Telegram "has a distributed structure for security purposes and includes subsystems located on the territory of different states and managed by various legal entities. " The document also indicated that correspondence that is transmitted through secret chat rooms is never stored on Telegram servers, and correspondence from cloud chats is "distributed among different subsystems and never stored in one place."

The head of Roskomnadzor, Alexander Zharov, nevertheless believes that Telegram's arguments have "a certain amount of slyness." "Any messenger can change its architecture in order to comply with the legislation of the country in which he works," Zharov admitted earlier.